


Right Behind

by BrosleCub12



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hugging, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Post-Season/Series 03, Watson-genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:23:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5449880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrosleCub12/pseuds/BrosleCub12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A moment shared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Behind

*

Jon Watson steps up behind Sherlock and puts her hands on both his shoulders.

‘Hello,’ she says it quietly, calmly, when he starts – he didn’t know she was here, she realises. He’s been staring out of that window for. Well. A small eternity, really, as is his wont. It’s so reassuringly Sherlock that it just… takes her over for a moment, takes her away from still-lingering grief.

‘You alright?’ Sherlock asks the question in a way that suggests he’s surprised; at Jon, at her coming out of nowhere. She gives a small ‘Hm,’ a kind of low grunt, stupidly lazy before she makes the move; with a quick, reassuring squeeze to the shoulders she moves her hands to where they’re tucked into his pockets. At the silent bidding, Sherlock takes them out and quickly, Jon puts her own hands over both and then, just like that, she’s bringing both sets of arms around in front of Sherlock, her fingers gently linking themselves around his own.

Sherlock, for his part, looks slightly perturbed.

‘Sorry,’ Jon mutters quietly. ‘You just… looked like you needed one.’ She rests her cheek briefly, very briefly, on Sherlock’s shoulder, pursing her lips together to stop the hysterical chuckling she suspects might burst from her any minute because this – this isn’t them. This is different. Unordinary. Ordinary for other people. Maybe it’s the same thing. ‘A hug, I mean.’

‘I…’ Sherlock glances down at her. ‘You know people will talk.’ His voice is a curious rumble, so wonderfully familiar – he doesn’t seem distressed, just inquisitive – and Jon averts her eyes, keeps them focused ahead at the window-pane, at the houses opposite, at dull clouds above the rooftops.

‘Oh, well. Never mind people.’ _People_ didn’t give the best damn best man’s speech in the world at her wedding. _People_ didn’t risk imprisonment and banishment, just for her own ordinary hide. _People_ didn’t hold her hand at her husband’s funeral.

‘Jon?’ Sherlock makes a slight movement and she realises he’s trying to free one of his hands; she lets it go readily, only for him to put the hand on top of _her_ arm, instead. ‘Sorry about Marcus.’

She blinks at his back; rests her forehead against the gap between his shoulder blades. ‘You haven’t said that before.’ It’s a soft mumble into his spine.

‘I know,’ he clears his throat. ‘Sorry.’

‘Not your fault, Sherlock.’ She keeps her face pressed against his back; rubs her free hand up and down his arm, simply because it isn’t. He can’t be blamed for her husband’s misdeeds. All the same, it hurts like hell. Sherlock doesn’t say a thing; but she feels his hand move on her other arm and she presses impossibly closer, squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, for once grateful for the slightly ridiculous height distance.

There are welts, she remembers, under her forehead; welts from Sherlock’s excursions across the world, that she still hasn’t asked about but which tell their own story. He needs to tell her, soon. She can’t go on not knowing.

‘Want to talk?’ she offers instead; wonders if she imagines the sudden tension of his back. ‘Okay, fair enough. Suits me fine,’ she shrugs, before turning her head and pressing her cheek against the shoulder-blades instead.

She should really let him go, she registers, she is being too… unlike herself right now, so unlike that woman in the underground who jabbed an angry finger his way and said _Look, I find it difficult, this sort of stuff_. And she does, still. She finds it extremely difficult. But she’s seen hell and Sherlock’s seen hell and they’ve both seen hell together and just like three – no, three and half years before, they’ve made a dash from it all, cuffed together but grasping each other’s hands all the same, her fingers brushing his sleeve as though it’s enough to stop him doing anything stupid even though she knows he’ll do whatever the hell he wants, anyway.

He doesn’t do that much, these days, though. That’s. That’s slightly worrying. Good, but. Worrying.

‘Want me to stop now?’ she asks him, when the silence in the room – the way she suddenly feels as though she’s all that’s holding him up in the quiet – becomes too much.

(She smells of minty shampoo and soft cotton fabric softener, so many smells close to his back and when, he wonders, were they last this close? When he stood beside her at her wedding? When she held him at the reception, if just for a few seconds?

He doesn’t know what to say in response to the question, so he doesn’t say anything).

‘Sherlock,’ she says his name carefully. ‘Sherlock, are you… craving?’

Sherlock swallows, keeps his eyes fixed on the window-pane, very, very hard. (If he focuses hard enough, maybe he’ll be able to pinpoint whether the man walking his rough collie down the opposite pavement is sleeping with his secretary or his club treasurer but it’s as if his brain has shortened out and he’s too aware of Jon’s arm, suddenly still around him, Jon’s eyes on his back).

‘Listen.’ She reaches for his shoulder, tries to make him look around at her. ‘No, listen. If you tell me now, I won’t kick off. Just be honest.’ They’re _both_ addicts, after all, in the end. The thought pains her – the image of her husband, standing poised with his gun, is too clear – and she can’t stand up herself, suddenly, has to press her face back against his shoulder and just… _stay,_ for a minute and she doesn’t have to look up to know that _he_ knows what she’s doing.

‘I am,’ his voice tickles her hair and she nods, a minute movement, into his shirt. He is. Okay. Okay.

(He is. He’s been _craving_ since the early morning, since he spent the night staring at the ceiling and wondering what was happening out in the world on the other side of these walls. House arrest is starting to kill him; he needs to find an answer).

‘Then I’ll make sure you don’t,’ she tells him and then her arm is back around him, her cheek is leaning against his shoulder and she’s closing her eyes and breathing against his shirt, long and slow.

‘Jon – ’

‘I’ll make sure you _don’t,’_ she tells him and it’s firm, with bite, fills up the room and he falls silent again.

(It helps, in a way. If he’s here, if Jon is holding him like this, gently but firmly, then he won’t make for the door, not without a fight at the very least, a fight she will take on and that he cannot, will not put her through. She’s standing between him and the tempting offers of the outside and it makes him - a small part of him, wants to scream in protest, very deep down, but the sound of that scream is quieter now, more muffled than it used to be; muffled by everything else that feels just a little bit safer under a pair of doctor’s hands).

‘You will get him, Sherlock,’ she tells him, then, as they both stare out of the window together, at the people down below. The two of them, separated from the rest of the world – she’d almost forgotten what that felt like, in a way, the fallacy of falling through into it after Sherlock fell and trying to be part of it and _almost_ succeeding, until Marcus Morstan lifted the veil and revealed himself, revealed who he really was.

They have never been normal.

She starts, suddenly, as Sherlock’s phone vibrates and he fumbles for it, in his pocket. At the same time, the sound of crying – a familiar, high whine, instantaneous – comes from the monitor that she keeps next to the skull on the mantlepiece and she grins a little, arms falling away from Sherlock as he checks whatever text he’s been sent.

‘There she blows,’ she notes, ‘time for a feed, I think. Everything okay?’

He pauses; reading the screen and then opens his mouth – seems to register the crying for the first time, gives a little shake. ‘Yeah, uh. Mycroft, he’s. He’s coming over.’ He says it slowly, eyes slipping between the baby-monitor and Jon, a silent kind of _Is that alright?_

She raises her head, a single nod. ‘Right. I’ll get her up and sorted and we’ll figure out a plan of action. Okay, darling, I’m coming!’ she calls as she heads for the stairs, the two sentences so odd on her tongue, one after the other, even as she jogs her way up to where her daughter has woken up squalling in her cot, hungry and in need of a cuddle.

(He watches her go and keeps a look-out for Mycroft’s car, listens to the familiar sounds of comfort over the monitor, the murmurs and babbles between his best friend and his goddaughter. The soft, crooning timbre that the two share; the way Jon kisses each of her chubby fingers. Keeping one hand on him, and one hand on her daughter.

He folds his arms around himself; exhales. Waits, and keeps watch).

*

**Author's Note:**

> In case you're wondering: I used to write a lot of Sherlock&fem-John fic when I first started in this fandom and the habit has never quite left me. Recently, what with all the angst of Series 3, and my lingering fascination with how female-Watson would be different to the Watson that we know (which I realise Elementary covers and extremely well) I've just wanted to see how that Watson might comfort Sherlock in any given scenario. Thanks for indulging me.


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